2018-19 Seminars & Speaking Topics

We welcome the opportunity to bring our programs to your small business, nonprofit, governmental, or community organization. These offerings can be delivered as 2-, 3- and 4-hour programs, as well as shorter break-out and keynote presentations.

The Inner Game of Conflict

Giving and Receiving Feedback

Simple Strategies to Conflict Management

Three Little Words That Will Change Your Life Forever

Improv Skills for Leaders

The Space in Between: The Power of Silence in Life and Leadership

Addressing Stress from the Inside Out (2-part program)

Courageous Conversations (coming soon)

The Resilient Leader Immersion Program is an 8-month program designed to facilitate lasting transformation and skill building. It uses group and individual processes to create a personal blueprint for expanded leadership capacity.

Summary Descriptions

The Inner Game of Conflict

When we think of conflict, we often think of it as something “out there,” involving other people and to be avoided at all costs. But what if our responses to conflict had nothing to do with others, and everything to do with ourselves? This is the Inner Game: recognizing that outer conflict is rooted in our personal experiences, fears, and filters. It’s also related to the competing internal voices duking it out inside each of us, everyday. This session introduces you to the Ladder of Inference as a method for understanding how you move from observation to action; how to notice and acknowledge your triggers, privileges, biases, and assumptions; and strategies for deescalating conflict from the inside out.

Giving and Receiving Feedback

Our relationship to feedback is complicated and contrary. On the one hand, people crave it as a way to learn and grow. It’s evidence that their work has been noticed and considered. On the other, we fear feedback, as it might hold up a mirror to something we’d rather not see. It potentially points out our weaknesses and could leave us demoralized and deflated. Feedback is critical to a thriving culture, so it’s important to know how to give and receive it in a productive, effective, and compassionate manner. We’ll go beyond the “feedback sandwich” and discuss the different types of feedback; how to share criticism and praise so it’s received appropriately; using coaching techniques to bring about desired behaviors; and how to make feedback a natural part of your ongoing operations (not just something saved for annual reviews).

Simple Strategies for Conflict Management

Most of us feel woefully underprepared in dealing with conflict. Any number of issues get in our way, from lessons from our family of origin to fear of retaliation. Usually, it all tends to point us toward a single reaction: AVOIDANCE. As a result, we grow less able to engage with others with whom we disagree. There’s no cookie-cutter solution to the challenge, but by developing deeper awareness and choosing new behaviors, we can all become more at ease with conflict. We’ll explore a simple, easy-to-apply framework that uses nonviolent language, vulnerability, empathy, transparency, and humility to transform conflict into cooperation.

Three Little Words That Will Change Your Life Forever

The problem can manifest in multiple ways: micro-managing, control issues, martyr syndrome, being the hero. We try to do good that’s not ours to do. We become helicopter colleagues and leaders. We forge an identity that’s based on being the person who makes everything okay. Our intentions are good. We’re trying to help, trying to make someone else’s life and work easier.

But there’s a dark side to those well-meaning actions. Taken too far, the result is disempowered employees, colleagues, family, and friends. If we want to cultivate relationships based on trust, respect, and personal agency, we must examine how we sabotage that effort through our tendency to play the hero, martyr, or puppeteer. This workshop explores the seductive pull of each of these roles, and offers a simple framework that will support self-awareness of unhealthy patterns and how to flip them. We’ll discover how embracing a coach-approach, counter-intuitive relationship framework benefits you and everyone you work with.

Improv Skills for Leaders

Through a series of increasingly fun and challenging activities, you will be engaged in exercises specifically chosen to improve your speaking, listening, and observation skills; increase your confidence in a variety of situations; and develop enhanced creative thinking abilities. In addition, you will experience traditional business activities, such as brainstorming, decision making and team cooperation, in a fresh, interesting context.

Improv is a highly experiential, collaborative method of raising awareness of and deepening key executive presence and leadership skills. The full Improv Skills for Leaders experience is designed so that participants increase their capacity to have a healthy response in challenging situations; expand their resilience by experiencing “safe failure”; and fine-tune their non-verbal, whole-brain observation and listening skills.

The Space in Between: The Power of Silence in Life and Leadership

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. —Viktor E. Frankl

Surrounded. Every day, we are surrounded. By noise, people, electronics, pressure to perform and produce. We move without pause, multitask without focus, leaving no space for reflection, renewal, or truly listening to one another.

There’s a call for a new energy to infuse our homes and workplaces, our organizations and relationships. It’s an introverted energy, one that looks inward. Creates silence. Takes time. Leaves space in between our thoughts and our speech. Leads though listening and learns through reflection.

In this informative and inspiring talk, we’ll explore what’s possible in the space in between, as well as how to tap into our introvert energy as leaders, entrepreneurs, and creative thinkers. It doesn’t matter where you fall on the spectrum; we all have introvert energy, and we’re going to learn to amplify it in service of our goals and relationships.

Addressing Stress, From the Inside Out (2-part series)

Part 1: Individually oriented solutionsStress doesn’t have to be, well, stressful! When we understand the roots of our stress and how to turn it around for our benefit, our capacity to be compassionate, resilient leaders increases. In this session, we’ll use two primary tools as catalysts for individual exploration of our leadership stressors: Kelly McGonigal’s TEDTalk “How to Make Stress Your Friend,” and a “re-authoring” exercise that offers a private way to process and reframe stress.

Part 2: Community-based solutionsIsolation – or “the dangerous disconnect” – is one of the biggest challenges leaders face. It follows, then, that one of the keys to resilient leadership is being able to ask for and receive support and input from others. Picking up from Part 1, we’ll continue to explore healthy responses to stress, this time focusing on group processes. Two strategies will be introduced and practiced: the QuestionBurst (from the work of Hal Gregersen) and the Circle of Trust process (from the work of Parker Palmer).